


Children Dangling the Keys to the Kingdom

by EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12



Series: Lived, Loved, Lost [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Brief description of violence, Cannibalism, Canon Typical Violence, Children, Dark Will, Emotional Repression, Fluff, Hannibal Loves Will, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Murder Husbands, On the Run, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Vulnerable Hannibal, Will Loves Hannibal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 14:26:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14107329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12/pseuds/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12
Summary: There are things Will Graham knows that he does not know about the darkness that lurks in Hannibal's mind. He sees far more than anyone else has been allowed to see, ventures deeper than anyone else, but there are things still buried.And there are circumstances beyond his control, moments of perfect clarity when the emotions he sees as nearly tangible in their intensity. And he is left, in those moments, to pick up the pieces and help stitch back together the facade that Hannibal had carefully crafted for himself.One of these situations comes in the form of a small child, a little girl, who sees Hannibal pulls the lungs from her father's chest as she lingers in teh doorway. And in that moment, Will Graham is left with a choice...Title is from The Crucible





	Children Dangling the Keys to the Kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, folks! 
> 
> thanks for stopping by, I hope you enjoy this! In my recent pieces, I've really enjoyed exploring the relationship that Hannibal has with children as a result of his own past as well as his own moral philosophy. It's just been interesting to kind of explore that, in ties with his relationship with Will as well. 
> 
> I hope you all all enjoy this story, and I'd love to hear what you have to say! If you do like it and are interested in reading a wholly different (think far less violent but much more sad) exploration of everyone's favorite Cannibal, you can read my story Flowers and Chocolate on here. 
> 
> Find me on tumblr at the same name, I'd love to chat with y'all about all things Hannibal or otherwise! 
> 
> As always, I hope you enjoy. Please R and R, let me know what you think!

It was rare that Will had seen some stronger emotion than distaste radiate off of Hannibal with such clear vibrancy. Perhaps when Bedelia had gotten her last turns in and dug into his ribcage over the nature of his relationship with Will, the fact that any intimacy Hannibal had ever had had been scarred and desecrated with blood: from his sister to his now lover who had taken the insult in without much of a care for Bedelia’s opinion. But he could see the anger in Hannibal’s eyes. The vengeance that she had carefully pulled from him until the pretense of artistry was nearly lost on what remained of her body and instead left behind was only a blood-soaked magnum opus that had launched the final nail in the coffin of Jack Crawford’s career and put them both into the world as two of the world’s most wanted criminals.

But those displays of emotion were limited in both scope and frequency. If true anger, enough to boil the blood of lesser men, had brought on the scene they had left behind them, then Will had been well within his rights to fear that passion might do the same. The emotions that came with intimacy were wrought with terrifying clarity. Hesitation, loss, vulnerability all bombarded him with the idea that he was, for the first time, connected to another individual on such a level that they could no longer be separated.

That first time, when he had raised his palm, clothing still pristine and put together, and Hannibal’s had pressed against it, a perfect enantiomer to his own, he had felt the breath nearly sucked from his body. He had never felt love, he thought, until perhaps that moment. It was not a creeping sensation as he thought it might be, tied with steel cables of their near-constant warring the past few years. It was instead a deluge of desire. Sexual, maybe. But for closeness. Togetherness.

He thinks now that perhaps the fact that he found that closeness sexually cheapens it in some way. That he, not hesitant after a glass of heavy wine and caught in a swirl of his changing emotions, had sucked open-mouthed kisses against the skin of a man who was touching the same scar he had cut into him after killing their surrogate child rather than trying to reach some other plane of intellectual understanding. A poetic scar maybe, one that reacted to being touched with the sensitivity of something far stronger. There was no taking the high-road in this, but perhaps letting himself be undressed, his tired body stroked with touches that possessed a gentleness he couldn’t have anticipated, was better than diving further into Hannibal’s darkness. Was companionship his body better than his mind? In some ways, it felt quite the opposite.

And it was those nights that were tinged with raw emotion. Careful precision, as Hannibal did all things. Pleasure was optimized, easy to obtain. But it wasn’t quite the goal. The heavy thrusts, pushing him further into Will’s body, or Will into his own, were not Hannibal’s end game. Will could see it on his face, using his hands to trace the strong cut of Hannibal’s jaw until he got to where his lips were just slightly upturned, his nostrils flaring just a bit when he allowed himself to be distracted from Will to where the barely-pronounced wrinkles near his eyes held in them an unmeasurable happiness at the bond between them. And those moments nearly overwhelmed Will, and he would press his head to Hannibal’s next, kissing old cuts, simply to separate his eyes from the dark ones that would like nothing more than to hold his gaze as they took their pleasure with each other.

He craved them now. Knew that he also wanted those moments of pure emotion. Nothing that was so callous as moments of weakness or desperation or some other interval, but moments of fierce connection that his body ached for at every inopportune and unfeasible moment and took full advantage of when those opportunities came to fruition. He loved those moments, he knew, as much as he loved Hannibal, because they allowed him to see Hannibal, down to his core that he had layered and layered and layered with bits of an uncomfortable façade for his whole life before Will knew him and after they had begun this journey together. Will knew that in ways, he had hidden him further under layers of person suit, pushed him down into an affair with Alana, a kinship with Jack Crawford, into exposing himself eventually when the strain Will had created became too much. It was impossible to absolve himself of that responsibility, but it was what had landed them so often in their shared bed, quiet in the aftermath except for harsher breathing and a thin sheen of sweat sinking into sheets that would need changed again.

Those emotions were not the same when they killed together. Instead of undiluted emotions, the feelings that came from Hannibal were in line with his modus operandi; those of a man enjoying a bit of fine art, the whimsical tendencies of a slightly eccentric individual who might have been putting the final touches on a watercolor rather than twisting sinew into odd angles around metal bars to display the man at the bank who hadn’t wanted to help them open an account and who had made his opinions on the nature of their relationship quite clear. The whimsy had been there still when Hannibal had turned to Will, holding up his trophy from the night, and suggested that they send a bit to the female clerk that had finally helped them as a sign of thanks. Will had put his knife away and instead suggested that if they wanted to remain in this area for any longer, they might take some sort of precautionary measures that didn’t involve that level of self-indulgence.

And the amusement had remained, only a hint of the real fervor behind them as he watched Will finish his own touches on the display. Enough to mark it as theirs. Enough to make it clear that the evolution of the Chesapeake Ripper was no longer imminent but fully realized. He wondered vaguely what Freddie Lounds might call him in the press, or if they would remain forever Bonnie and Clyde in her surprisingly limited imagination. If eliminating Bedelia hadn’t brought him such personal satisfaction, he would have advocated they find her instead. But there were things more important.

Which is why now, at this exact moment, seeing such raw emotion on Hannibal’s features was so shocking. He knew the crimes of the person they were killing, a man who stricken his wife so hard across the face at the market that she had fallen into the dirt, striking her head on stone. When the fishmonger had tried to help her, the man had pushed her again, forcing her along the path towards their home. A few questions later, and his fate had been sealed.

This man had died like others, choking on his own blood, howling in horrific pain as Hannibal sliced various organs from him. Nothing new or particularly extraordinary about his methods. There was no sign of the woman, only remnants of her clothes. Hannibal had commented, as he began to cut away the lungs he would take with them, that she was most likely dead already, buried in a grave in the yard to keep it quiet from the police. Or perhaps she had escaped into a world that would offer little comfort, but a life of genuine freedom.

It was Will that had heard it first. A high sound, unfamiliar and threatening. And he had turned, his own knife, different from Hannibal’s array of scalpels and long-handles, ready to strike. But he hadn’t as a small child, mirror image of the woman from the market, had peered at him from around the door facing, eyes as dark as the room’s shadows, skin only a few shades lighter brown than her mother’s.

She stared at him, and then at Hannibal who had stopped his work to stare back at her, not blinking or wavering in the slightest as she held his gaze, hand still inside her father’s now near-empty chest cavity. She said something in quick French, the only word that Will understood fully was “mother”, her gaze unwavering.

Hannibal stopped what he was doing and stepped towards her. Will’s chest tightened, watching him hold the knife in his fingers, slick with the man’s blood, as he stepped towards her. He stood in front of her for a moment, but on his face was not the same nuance that usually came with killing. No whimsy, no self-congratulations. Only a strange mix of pain and a staggering amount of melancholia that nearly sucked the breath from Will’s lungs. The instincts in him were screaming that they needed to move. To leave this place. That if Hannibal was going to kill her, despite what he may think of that, then he should do it so they could move on. To stay was to wait for trouble to burst through the door at any moment, the police, the neighbors, a resident of the house they hadn’t known about. But another part of him, the part tied so fully to the man standing between him and this small child, was petrified. Not with fear. With fascination.

And then Hannibal kneeled down, nearly at eye level, his still-short hair catching the breeze from the nearby fan, and spoke to her rapidly. She responded, cocking her head to the side, her eyes trailing to Will for a moment, to Hannibal’s knife as if she knew that a wrong answer might perhaps find her under it, though Will was starting to find the possibility less and less likely. He heard only pieces in his own broken understanding of the language, but it was enough. A discussion of family.

“We need to leave.” Hannibal finally said, standing fully, the girl watching him all the while. “Are you ready?” He asked Will, and stepped to wrap a hand around the package.

“Hannibal…”

“Her mother is returning from the hospital in the morning to collect her.” Hannibal said evenly. “They are leaving to stay with the grandmother. The mother is pregnant.”

“You want to leave this child.”

“Yes.” Hannibal said, not looking at him. “I will not harm her.” He stepped towards the door, the girl watching as he stepped away from the grotesquely beautiful display on the floor. “He made it all the way to the door before stopping again, his eyes never lifting to Will’s own. “I will wait for you outside.”

And Will could feel the twisting of his insides, a result of this new realization that there were things that he had not touched lingering inside Hannibal at the moment, buried so deep that not even years of conversations and traveling had come close to prying them out. And now this girl, having watched her father gutted and maimed there on the floor of her house, having talked to perhaps the world’s most infamous serial killer, had pulled it from him unknowingly.

He stared back at her, down to his own weapons. Hannibal had left him the opportunity to kill her: to eliminate any witnesses which would have been both smarter and safer, and yet Will knew he could not do it. They had killed people of all backgrounds, races, creeds, colors…and this child pulled not only at the humanity buried within himself but had pulled whatever remnant of it was left from inside of Hannibal. And so he stepped around her, where her eyes stayed on her father’s body, and opened the door to follow Hannibal.

“Merci.” She said, and he had the strangest feeling it was for the freedom the display they had created. Perhaps they had been making it for her all along.

Hannibal didn’t speak on the drive home, a rarity. In his own wishes to discuss things, he would normally ask Will for his opinions, his input on things. How long he thought they could now stay in the area. What this meant for them. Sometimes he would look over at Will with hunger in his eyes and before the night was through would suck hard kisses into Will’s skin, raising the blood to the surface in some coarse bastardization of what they had done together. But tonight was different. He disposed of their clothes in silence, storing away the lungs in the hidden basement where they stored all of the remnants of their old life and this new one beneath false floorboards. He burned the blood from their clothes without so much as a second glance, said nothing as Will went to the shower, poured no wine for himself, left the book he had been reading on the setae in favor of lying on their shared bed, not bothering to pull back the duvet.

When Will came from the shower, dressing in his sleep clothes to lie down for what he thought might be a silent night of self-contemplation, Hannibal had clung to his chest. Pressed his face into the fabric of Will’s shirt that quickly became renewed with the heavy dampness of tears. Uncertain of his own power in this, he wrapped his arms around him as best he could, one hand threading through his hair as Hannibal finally spoke of his sister, of his own becoming. Or perhaps not, he was sure to clarify, but the end of his opportunity to be anything but this. He was not crying for himself. Only for her. For his own betrayal of her and he taste of her as she slid down his throat.

And when it was over, the image of the little girl, clinging to the door frame, her tight black curls messy on her head was forever burned in his brain as understanding had finally come to him. And the emotions, the pure, raw fire that came with it burned between them as they came together, vulnerable and impassioned and somehow more free. And there was no thought given to leaving that place, not now, not as long as they could stay there, not as long they could feel like this.


End file.
